The Politics of Linguistic Metaphors in Latin

In a showdown between the grammarian Pomponius Porcellus and the emperor Tiberius, who used a word of doubtful Latinity, the grammarian reportedly had the last laugh: “You, Caesar, are able to give citizenship to people, but not to words” (Suet. Gram. 22.2; cf. Dio 57.17.2). The anecdote is a telling one about the relationship between the princeps and intellectual culture (Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 70), but it also illustrates a distinctly Roman way of viewing vocabulary: through the prism of citizenship (civitas).

Using a culturally situated approach to cognitive linguistics, this paper argues for a Greco-Roman conceptual metaphor of POETIC COMPETITION IS BOXING. I will analyze Virgil’s use of a boxing match in the Aeneid as an adjudication of a poetic competition between earlier Greek hexametric poets, concluding with a discussion of how this episode potentially comments on Virgil’s choice to write political poetry.

At Cat. 2.17 Cicero shifts his attention from Catiline himself, now safely outside Rome’s walls, to the conspirator’s followers, to whom he offers, to the extent possible, to apply the cure of his own advice and oratory (medicinam consili atque orationis meae...afferam). Cicero’s use of medical metaphor to cast his Catilinarian opponents as sicknesses afflicting the body politic and his own policies as cures (e.g., Cat. 1.11, 1.30-1; 2.1-2, 2.11; Sul. 53, 76) has received ample attention (e.g., Leff; Gildenhard; Walters; Mebane).

Recent decades have witnessed a renaissance in scholarship on Marcus Terentius Varro, characterized by a renewed interest in the political dimensions of the antiquarian’s treatises. This is especially true of the De lingua Latina, a text that is inextricably bound up with the late Republican struggle to redefine Romanness (Bloomer 1997, Moatti 1997, Dench 2005, Wallace-Hadrill 2008, Zehnacker 2008, Spencer 2011 and 2015).